The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between Los Angeles CA and Stamford, Connecticut.
M. de J. - l'interviewee J.G. - l'interviewer
Connecticut in fall California in fall
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LMJ: You were born in Indonesia, which at that time was the Dutch East Indies [1]. What brought your parents there?
Marjolijn: We are talking about MANY generations back, on my father’s side at least 5 generations back to the mid-nineteenth century; on my mother’s maternal side at least 3 generations back.
LMJ: So your mother language was Dutch? Were you schooled in Dutch?
Marjolijn: I was born on Borneo where my father worked in the Royal Dutch Oil fields. In March of 1942 when the Japanese invaded the then Dutch East Indies we were living on Java. (The book Song of Survival: Women Interned, written by Helen Colijn, which tells the story of the British missionary, Margaret Dryburg, takes place in one of the camps on Sumatra.) The Japanese incarcerated all non-Indonesians into camps of women and children only (boys until the age of 10) and men’s camps. Women were made to work in the banana plantations, herding swine, or digging pits; children were to tend the vegetable gardens, the produce of which went to the Japanese commander’s house. Education was strictly forbidden.
My mother, at great risk, had decided she didn’t want an illiterate child and began to teach me and a small group (4, 5?) of other children with a stick in the sand, as there weren’t any paper, pencils, or books. She was not a teacher but simply improvised, taking things a step further when we appeared to be ready to move on. Miraculously, all but one of us entered 4th grade after the war was over. When we arrived in Melbourne I was 9 years old and very warmly dealt with at St. Michael’s Anglican school. I did end up repeating 4th grade in Amsterdam a year later because the material taught in Melbourne and in Amsterdam was too different and, of course, I had not had any Dutch history at all.
LMJ: Having been a survivor of WW2 at a young age, did you feel a special affinity to Anne Frank.
Marjolijn: Yes, to some extent but much of that was also due to my not having any friends in Amsterdam yet and to our being so close in age, that is to say the age I was when reading her diary and the age she was when writing it. In real time, born in 1929, she was 7 years older than I. She seemed like a far-flung friend to me. My diary was similar to hers in that it talked about school and school friends and such. When I read through it a few years later I found it self-absorbed and I destroyed it, as I have done with every other diary I ever kept for any length of time, stopping that activity definitively when I was in my thirties.
LMJ: You completed B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. studies in the USA. What were your majors? What was the subject of your doctoral thesis?
Marjolijn: B.A. from Hunter College in NYC with a major in French and a minor in Classical Greek. M.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a major in French and a minor in Spanish. Ph.D. from the same university with a major in French Literature, a 1st minor in Spanish Literature and a 2nd minor (required) in Comparative Literature. My doctoral dissertation was a stylistic study of one of the books (“Les Feux”) of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s lengthy epic Les Tragiques, concerning the Huguenots and their suffering at the hands of the Catholic Church.
LMJ: You taught summer courses at New York University for 10 years. Tell our readers about that.
Marjolijn: I began teaching Literary Translation (French à English) in NYU’s SCPS program, which as an elective course was then offered for ten weeks only in the summer. If I am not mistaken all the courses are taught on-line these days and I must confess that I am happy I was still able to teach this face-to-face! The students were completing many required courses in specific areas (Legal, Medical, Commercial translation) and this was one of the few they could choose as an elective.
LMJ: You have a long list of honors and awards. Which one gave you the most satisfaction?
Marjolijn: The African Literature Association has been and still is the most important professional organization to which I belong. For me it has been an education from the beginning in areas of literature and cultures of which I knew (and still do) all too little. After my membership of almost 28 years it has also become a community of friends for me, which I cherish. Receiving the Distinguished Membership Award from the ALA for my translations of Francophone African literature in particular was a crowning touch coming from an immensely respected and extraordinary organization.
LMJ: You were invited to be translator-in-residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyon. [1] Tell our readers a little about that.
Marjolijn: I found out that one could apply if working on a French or Francophone project of interest to them, so I did with Ken Bugul’s Riwan ou le Chemin de sable (1999). In September 2007 I spent an intensely satisfying month there, finishing about half the text and in the interim getting to know Lyon in many of its marvelous culturally rich aspects. Unfortunately, no publisher was ever found for the translation and I had to abandon the project when other (paying!) work came around.
LMJ: You first visited Africa in 1986 and subsequently made several visits to West Africa in the 1990s. What took you there?
Marjolijn: The purpose of my first visit was to visit my son, who had volunteered for the Peace Corps in Togo. Subsequent visits were to Togo, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. On two such occasions I went on grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and on two others for African Literature Association Conferences. I did research in those countries, with the assistance of my husband who was a professional photographer and who videographed subjects of interest. He filmed one 75-minute documentary that I presented at an ALA Conference.
LMJ: Explain the connection between your family’s colonial background and your interest in Africa
Marjolijn: I have been an activist all my life and have always despised colonialism, so that having the ability to use my professional activities to bring the voices of some African writers to an English readership was, and remains, very much a political action for me, in addition to the love I bring to these texts, of course.
LMJ: Can you name two African authors whose works you admire and have translated, and whom you have come to know personally.
Marjolijn : Werewere Liking, originally from Cameroon, has been living in Côte d’Ivoire for most of her adult life. She established the Village KI-YI M'Bock (signifying "ultimate knowledge" in Bassa, Liking's native language) in 1985 on the periphery of the city of Abidjan. (The Village KI-YI can be found on-line in many different entries.) Its purpose is to protect and maintain traditional Pan-African culture in all its forms, ranging from theater, dance, music (both instrumental and vocal), the plastic arts, costume design to performances and classes for adolescents. Liking is a truly Renaissance person in that she is equally gifted in almost all of these arts herself. In addition she is a really fine painter and playwright and an exceptional novelist. Of her novels I have translated three: The Amputated
Memory (The Feminist Press, 2007), It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral (Journal of a Misovire), and Love-Across-a-Hundred-Lives (University of Virginia Press, CARAF, 2000). Although I admire and love all of them, my personal favorite is Love-Across-a-Hundred-Lives for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the amazing character of the grandmother who weaves in and out of the narrative, spreading her wisdom (literally) across the ages.
The novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar is from Algeria where she grew up and did her university studies, before moving to Paris. In June of 2005 she was elected to the Académie Française, the first Maghrebian author to receive this honor.
Her film Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978) is the story of an Algerian woman engineer returning to Algeria after a long Western exile. Women are always the main focus in her work – women in their relationship to society, to the men in their lives, to their professional and private worlds, to exile and to war – mixing historical truth and mythical material, as well as autobiographical and fictional elements. Of the many works she has written I have translated the following: Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War (The Feminist Press, 2005), Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, (CARAF, University of Virginia Press, 1992), Algerian White, co-translator: David Kelley (Seven Stories Press, 2001).
Thanks to a great extent to the ALA and to university departments of African Studies and African Literature, among others, African literature and African writers individually have finally gained some of the prestige, recognition and attention that must be paid to them in the West. We need to get away from the Euro-centered world and these works are among some of the finest guides to get us there.
LMJ: What translating projects unrelated to African writers have you found to be particularly interesting or challenging?
Marjolijn :
In the past few years I have had the pleasure of working on several psychoanalytic books written in Dutch (two by Hendrika Freud and two by Antonie Ladan). Psychology and psychoanalysis have always been of great interest to me; the challenge lay in working on a text whose content is not all that familiar to me on a professional level. However, as with some of the African writers, I was friends (since childhood!) with the former and able to approach the other so that LMJs I had could be sent directly to them, always a blessing and – more often than not – a necessity.
LMJ: Finally, of all the works you have translated, can you mention any particular one to which you feel a special affinity.
Marjolijn: One of my own favorite translations is Myriam Antaki’s Verses of Forgiveness, a small, supremely lyrical novel that takes place in the Middle East, whose theme is the tragedy caused on so many levels by Judaism, Christianity and Islam’s misunderstanding of each other.
Marjolijn de Jager's contact details :
(203) 322-0706, [email protected]
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Footnotes by Jean Leclercq:
[1] Thanks to its hardy navigators – whom we sometimes tend to forget – the tiny royalty of the Netherlands was able to carve out (and to preserve until the 20th century) a vast colonial empire in Asia and in the Americas. In the East this enterprise was the achievement of a commercial company, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the VOC), created by the Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces in 1602. The VOC also maintained a monopoly over Japan’s commerce with the West. Before being dissolved in 1799, the VOC was the instrument of Batavian capitalism and imperialism over two centuries. Subsequently, the colony of the East Indies was managed as a separate entity. Its defense was ensured by a private army of mercenaries, and it was independent of the Dutch metropolitan forces. The poet Arthur Rimbaud signed up to serve in the East
Indies, and after undergoing basic training in Den Helder (in Zeeland), he was sent to Java. He took very poorly to military life; he was quick to desert and returned to Europe by working on a cargo ship. That fleeting experience in the Far East must certainly have been a revelation for the young man from the Ardennes.
[2] Aubigné (Agrippa d'),1551-1630. « French poet, born close to Pons, in Saintonge (a former French province) a childhood friend of King Henry the Fourth, who remained an avowed Protestant all his life. Extremely precocious, he could read Latin, Greek and Hebrew before the age of eight years. (Dictionnaire des littératures, published under the direction of Philippe Van Tieghem. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968, pp. 258-259).
Agrippa d'Aubigné lived and died in the Maison de la Rive, Hotel de ville Street, Geneva.
He was the grandfather of Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquess of Maintenon, second wife of King Louis XIV
[3] A deformation of the German word Eidgenossen (name of the Genevan partisans of the confederation opposing the Duke of Savoie), which the French Catholics ended up using (originally pejoratively) to refer to Calvin Protestants in France. The wars of religion opposed the Papists and the Huguenots. French synonym: parpaillot(ote).
[4] La Villa Gillet, located in the Cerisaie Park at 25, rue Chazière, Lyon, aspires to be a laboratory of ideas. Artists and thinkers meet there periodically to contemplate together the problems of the contemporary world. The building was constructed in 1912, designed by the architect Joseph Folléa for the Gillet family, rich local industrialists. In May each year, the Assises internationales du Roman are held there. It is worth noting that since 2011 the Villa Gillet organises "Walls & Bridges – Transatlantic Insights" in New York. This festival is designed to facilitate a dialogue between French and American thinkers and artists.
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Additional reading:
Literary Translation by Marjolijn de Jager, Ph.D.
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